They walked on in silence through the blackness of the hemlock-shaded lane, where Ethan’s sawmill gloomed through the night, and out again into the comparative clearness of the fields.  On the farther side of the hemlock belt the open country rolled away before them grey and lonely under the stars.  Sometimes their way led them under the shade of an overhanging bank or through the thin obscurity of a clump of leafless trees.  Here and there a farmhouse stood far back among the fields, mute and cold as a grave-stone.  The night was so still that they heard the frozen snow crackle under their feet.  The crash of a loaded branch falling far off in the woods reverberated like a musket-shot, and once a fox barked, and Mattie shrank closer to Ethan, and quickened her steps.

At length they sighted the group of larches at Ethan’s gate, and as they drew near it the sense that the walk was over brought back his words.

“Then you don’t want to leave us, Matt?”

He had to stoop his head to catch her stifled whisper:  “Where’d I go, if I did?”

The answer sent a pang through him but the tone suffused him with joy.  He forgot what else he had meant to say and pressed her against him so closely that he seemed to feel her warmth in his veins.

“You ain’t crying are you, Matt?”

“No, of course I’m not,” she quavered.

They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow.  Ethan looked at them curiously.  For years that quiet company had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and freedom.  “We never got away-how should you?” seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver:  “I shall just go on living here till I join them.”  But now all desire for change had vanished, and the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability.

“I guess we’ll never let you go, Matt,” he whispered, as though even the dead, lovers once, must conspire with him to keep her; and brushing by the graves, he thought:  “We’ll always go on living here together, and some day she’ll lie there beside me.”

He let the vision possess him as they climbed the hill to the house.  He was never so happy with her as when he abandoned himself to these dreams.  Half-way up the slope Mattie stumbled against some unseen obstruction and clutched his sleeve to steady herself.  The wave of warmth that went through him was like the prolongation of his vision.  For the first time he stole his arm about her, and she did not resist.  They walked on as if they were floating on a summer stream.

Zeena always went to bed as soon as she had had her supper, and the shutterless windows of the house were dark.  A dead cucumber-vine dangled from the porch like the crape streamer tied to the door for a death, and the thought flashed through Ethan’s brain:  “If it was there for Zeena-” Then he had a distinct sight of his wife lying in their bedroom asleep, her mouth slightly open, her false teeth in a tumbler by the bed...